A mountaintop fortress built by people who had just freed themselves and did not intend to be taken again. Henri Christophe started it in 1805, the year after Haitian independence, and tens of thousands of formerly enslaved people finished it in 1820. It stands 40 metres high on the Bonnet à l’Evêque peak at 910 metres, covering ten thousand square metres, and it was armed with 365 cannon of every size, scavenged from what the European armies left behind. Pyramid stacks of cannonballs are still sitting along the walls. It was built against a French return that never came, because Napoleon had Europe to worry about. UNESCO listed it with the Sans-Souci Palace in 1982. It is 8 km uphill from Milot in the Nord department and it is still the country’s national symbol.
Milot, Nord, Haiti
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